I'm an amateur cartographer

[squigfried]

Did you read my previous LJ entry? It said (in a rather obscure way) that I wanted to "spend more time gathering and sharing data". This was more or less in reference to projects like Open Street Map which provide Creative Commons licensed data for useful things - in this case, street maps and local data that anyone can use free of charge.

So yesterday I bought a bluetooth GPS device.
Today I put it to the test :)


So here we have my pimped-out BMX.


With a bluetooth GPS device strapped to the handlebars.


And yours truly (with facial hair)


I went for a cycle around a bit. There's a couple of estates nearby that haven't been covered by contributors to openstreetmap.org yet. There's a few folks nearby who have mapped almost the entirety of Headingley and Meanwood (thanks folks!) so I thought I'd fill in a few bits that they haven't done yet.
Here's what it looks like (GPS route recorded by Maemo Mapper using OpenStreetMap.org's images).


And for comparison, here's my route whem imported into Google Earth.


All I need to do now is figure out the best way of getting this track into the site. The JOSM mapping tool that openstreetmap.org provides is a bit slow on my Mac, and I don't know how to use it yet :)

I'm pretty pleased that it's all worked so seamlessly so far.
Yay!